Crosscutting concerns degrade software quality. Before we can modularize the crosscutting concerns in our programs to increase software quality, we must first be able to find them. Unfortunately, accurately locating the code related to a concern is difficult, and without proper metrics, determining how much the concern is crosscutting is impossible. We propose a systematic methodology for identifying which code is related to which concern, and a suite of metrics for quantifying the amount of crosscutting code. Our concern identification and assignment guidelines resolve some of the ambiguity issues encountered by other researchers. We applied this approach to systematically identify all the requirement concerns in a 13,531 line program. We found that 95% of the concerns were crosscutting-indicating a significant potential for improving modularity-and that our metrics were better able to determine which concerns would benefit the most from reengineering.
Abstract. The ability to debug programs composed using aspect-oriented programming (AOP) techniques is critical to the adoption of AOP. Nevertheless, many AOP systems lack adequate support for debugging, making it difficult to diagnose faults and understand the program's composition and control flow. We present an AOP debug model that characterizes AOP-specific program composition techniques and AOP-specific program behaviors, and relates them to the AOP-specific faults they induce. We specify debugging criteria that we feel all AOP systems should support and compare how several AOP systems measure up to this ideal.We explain why AOP composition techniques, particularly dynamic and binary weaving, hinder source-level debugging, and how results from related research on debugging optimized code help solve the problem. We also present Wicca, the first dynamic AOP system to support full source-level debugging. We demonstrate how Wicca's powerful interactive debugging features allow a programmer to quickly diagnose faults in the base program behavior or AOPspecific behavior.
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